An objective measure of the size differences of grains; granularity effects visible graininess.
Objective term describing the amount that silver halide grains have clumped together within the emulsion.
In particle physics (especially concerning the calorimetry systems), granularity is the level of subdivision in the eta and phi directions. Finer granularities mean that a particle's energy deposition pattern can be known more precisely, while coarse granularities denote less precision.
An objective measurement which correlates with the subjective appearance of graininess. This and similar objective measurements indicate the ability of a film to record an image in terms that are meaningful from the standpoint of the appearance and usefulness of the photograph. Granularity is the value published in the film data sheet for Kodak aerial films, and it is given as the root-mean-square (rms) granularity value.
Artifact of cinematographic production due to the finite size of film emulsion grains, especially with high sensitivity film stocks.
The relative fineness or coarseness by which a mechanism can be adjusted. The phrase "the granularity of a single user" means the access control mechanism can be adjusted to include or exclude any single user.
The degree of specificity of information contained in a data element. A fact table that has fine granularity contains many discrete facts, such as individual sales transactions. A table that has coarse granularity stores facts that are summaries of individual elements, such as sales totals per day.
Degree of parallelism in an architecture, from job execution level (coarse) to logic device level (fine). Ability to increase system capacity and performance through incremental processor expansion.
The size of operations done by a process between communications events. A fine-grained process may perform only a few arithmetic operations between processing one message and the next, whereas a coarse-grained process may perform millions.
Although it can refer to level of detail in almost any context, granularity is more commonly used to refer to the closeness of the incremental power steps in a manufacturer’s processor range. A highly granular range is one where you can move to a more powerful processor without having to buy one far too big for your needs. The IBM mainframe range is pretty granular today, although it hasn’t always been so in the past, and some of the PCM vendors had a fine old time filling the gaps in a non-granular (lumpy?) IBM range.
Measure of the work done between synchronization points. Fine-grained applications focus on execution at the instruction level of a program. Such applications are load balanced but suffer from a low computation/communication ratio. Coarse-grained applications focus on execution at the program level where multiple programs may be executed in parallel.
The ratio between the amount of computation each processor does and the amount of interprocessor communication which takes place. See fine-grained parallelism. and course-grained parallelism.
A term often used in parallel processing to indicate independent processes that could be distributed to multiple CPUs. Fine granularity is illustrated by execution of statements or small loop iterations as separate processes; coarse granularity involves subroutines or sets of subroutines as separate processes. The more processes, the "finer" the granularity and the more overhead required to keep track of them. Granularity can also be related to the temporal duration of a "task" at work. It is not only the number of processes but also how much work each process does, relative to the time of synchronization, that determines the overhead and reduces speedup figures.
Size of the service; see coarse grain and fine grain.